Hello LQers,

I'm 13 and looking to learn much more about Linux. My aim is to (if possible) be certified in many different Linux/UNIX platforms before I'm 18 because I'm wanting a sysadmin job to get through college (fallback would be programming, but I love system administration!). Are people under the age of 18 (in US) eligible for these certification programs?

I want to where to get certified for, where to find training for, afe restrictions for, and the average cost for certification in the following systems:

• Red Hat
• Debian
• *BSD
• Solaris

Not only for job use, but personal enlightenment.

Also, any advice for an aspiring (albeit a few years from it; however, I might soon be the primary IT guy at my school) sysadmin from veterans?

Thanks in advance!

Hey sajro,

I was once in your position, and the best advice I can give is some advice a professor once gave to me:

When it comes down to it, certifications are worth less than the paper they're printed on. They're nice for when you're getting hired by an HR drone that doesn't know much about computers, but outside of that, useless - especially when it comes to system administration. I've gotten CompTIA certifications (A+, Net+, Security+), and I can tell you that none of them asked questions that were terribly relevant to system administration.

If you still wanna put yourself through the pain of taking these exams and what not before you have to, then check out CompTIA for general, vendor-neutral certification exams (www.comptia.com). I'm not sure what the current status of Linux certification exams is, especially regarding how useful they are; however, I'm pretty sure the answers are "of questionable value" and "not very". You could do a google search for "Red Hat Certified Engineer" and see what pops up.

I know the CompTIA ones will run you at least $150-200, and are meant for those with a least a year of experience.

Since you mentioned self-enlightenment, were I you, I would go through the following steps:

1. Get a computer or 2

2. Install everything you want to learn on separate partitions, just so you can get a hang of how the installs work

3. Pick one (Red Hat / Fedora seems like a good choice, since companies tend to like that one these days)

4. Break the system. Go after the things you know nothing about. Try not to break anything having to do with networking at first though - see why in step 5

5. Go on the internet and do a google search with your symptoms. I've had more than one interview where people have been very happy with the fact that I put "The ability to Google solutions to problems." on my resume.

6. Repeat 4-5 until you're satisfied you know enough about the OS/Distro

7. 8 or 9 very fulfilling years later, move on to the next OS ;-)


EDIT: Also, there are no age restrictions that I'm aware of for CompTIA certs

i suggest starting a blog and documenting you journey through the NIX* world. It will serve as a memory bank and also a good port folio for you moving forward.

Good luck... wish i started as early as you...

@justinmc: Thanks for the advice. I have several old computers...once my dad (a self-described "Charter Member of the Board of Procrastination") gets a router, I'm hooking a couple to it to mess around with (and one to host my site, which is where I'd document my 'journey,' as suggested by vw).

I'll probably grab a copy of CentOS. Also, do you happen to know a free compilation of SLED or is openSuSE the same thing? (I've heard many companies use that.) Eventually, the main branches of the three major BSDs: OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD. When I'm feeling masochistic, I'll get a copy of OpenSolaris. I'm already quite experienced with Debian/U(n)buntu and learning Arch (which isn't going to be commonly used but is great (IMO) for net-booting web terminals).

To TLDP, eh?

I'd suppose that using NetBSD is no less masochism than OpenSolaris (I only have user logins on a couple of BSD boxes - NetBSD and FreeBSD, and they annoy even me sometimes; though system amdinistrator seems to be more inclined towards BSD than towards Linux). About learning innards - take LFS (maybe compile the base system by ALFS, less typos spent..) and try to do something nice (for you at this moment, of course) that Debian won't let you do. Watch system becoming unmaintainable. Enjoy. Look at something non-standard just to get a perspective. Use chroot more than sanity allows (at some point, not always). It will make you better understand some things (I have done it. It is some strange pleasure). Try to find for your personal use a distribution with a killer feature for you...

My killer distro is Arch. The KISS philosophy is great. I love customising it for insanely quick boot times and I feel less wasteful without unused daemons running. It gives me the speed of Gentoo, the configurability of Slackware, and the simplicity of Debian (although, some would laugh at the thought of Debian being "simple"). It's on my desktop, server, and (when I get it in a few months) my laptop.

I think it is easy to make LFS beat Arch in speed booting. And if kill feature is quantity, not quality, you will always be shown something that will beat it.. But maybe I am biased, because for me kill feature in my favorite distribution is impossibility of conflict between correct packages, even if they are glibc versions.

I might just make an LFS project... make it, break it, work on it...build a package manager! Stuff like that. Trying to keep it at a short boot time (<30 secs from button to login prompt, <40 to graphical login) while making it robust. Who knows, I might make a pretty good distribution.

Spasiba!